Sandrine Revel

One of the greatest pleasures of my theatre-going life was seeing [b:Glenn|215932|Glenn|David Young|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1351098000l/215932._SY75_.jpg|209056] just after I returned from the biggest artistic risk of my life. I've now seen 3 different productions of this play. It's the sum total of my knowledge of Glenn Gould.

Both that play and this graphic novel are an attempt to understand this unique creative mind and use time jumps to navigate this. I found it really confusing for the first half of the book and that ultimately made it hard for me to buy in. Once I figured out it was a jumble of impressions and I saw my familiar Toronto landmarks I found I could settle in. I especially enjoyed the interlude with the CN Tower. The pages with hands on the keyboards were quite evocative.

In the end, I learned a few bits about his life but felt overall underwhelmed. I fully acknowledge it's probably because David Young's work inspired and touched me in a way that this book never came close to and not the quality of the graphic novel itself. Seriously, read the play. I wish there was a way people could see a production. Or failing that, I hear really good things about the François Girard film, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.… (més)

I haven't read the original books by Armistead Maupin, so I don't know if the cheesy soap opera tone of this graphic novel adaptation is in there or if it is just a function of distilling down all the main plot points to fit them in a slim volume.

A young single woman with the on-the-nose name of Singleton moves to San Francisco to make it on her own. She gets to know the landlady and other tenants in her apartment building, and we get to know all their romantic entanglements, which frequently revolve around infidelity. There's a whole lot of hooking up and breaking up. To add to the drama, terminal illness, being closeted, homophobia, pregnancy, a private investigator, and suicide are tossed into the mix, and then the ending really goes over the top with blackface, pedophilia, and accidental death. Too many of the plot developments depend on "it's a small world" type coincidences

Frankly, it's like three or four seasons of All My Children boiled down into a book that takes less than an hour to read.

Also, I always feel weird when the book is subject to the Google Translate game. This is the English translation of a French graphic novel adapting an novel originally written in English. I'm curious if the translators went back to Maupin's original novel as a source to reference his exact words or tone or if they just do a straight translation from the French and call it a day.

In the end, reading this brief graphic novel felt more like reading a Soap Opera Digest weekly recap than watching the soap itself. I'm almost curious to check out Maupin's first novel to get the full effect, but I doubt I will.… (més)